truth or dare - readers' answers

1/Aug/97

To behave normally is as difficult as naked eye stereoscope. True or false?

2/Aug/97

Slavery is unhappy. True or false?

It depends on the personality. Actually, most people need their masters to get enslaved by. It is a primate's way of life.
Kenji

3/Aug/97

Astronomy is psychology. True or false?

True. Astronomy talks about celestial bodies, revealing what we see and don't see as bodies. Any astronomical observation is accompanied by abstraction which shows how we understand things.
Kenji

4/Aug/97

Paranormality is humanity. True or false?

True. What people call paranormal phenomena are natural phenomena to which they don't have scientific explanations (often others do). It is easier for them to believe in paranormality than seeking explanations employing the methodology of science because the latter is not as intuitive as the former. Intuition has been developed for understanding happenings in social scale, and is not necessarily a good tool to understand the natural happenings in general. Intuition, for example, supports the existence of psychokinesis because in a society it is possible to apply power upon other people without touching (this in turn is due to the fact that the brain has control over many physical parts of the body). Every paranormal phenomenon shows an aspect of our society (and a functionality of our brains).
Kenji

5/Aug/97

People have not got any smarter. True or false?

True. We had intellectual Cambrian explosion thousands of years ago, and haven't changed much since then. Most of us are still concerned about problems people have had for all these years.
Kenji

6/Aug/97

Science is closer to divinities than religions are. True or false?

True. Religions are disconnected from the nature, and remain to be human creation. Science is our challenge to understand the nature, and forces us to forget this small human reality.
Kenji

7/Aug/97

Genetically engineered food is safer than human cloning. True or false?

False. Human cloning after all will just create another person with the same genome as an existing person. These two are different persons, and unless we get some crazy idea like not giving human right to the clone, I think there is only a small matter to consider ethically about it.
On the other hand, genetically engineered foods may contain protein which are not compatible with human, which may cause serious diseases.
Kenji

8/Aug/97

People has the right to know how a father who has just lost his daughter feels. True or false?

False unless they are the friends of the father and need to know how he feels in order to take care of him.
Kenji

9/Aug/97

Thinking requires you to be aware of what you are thinking. True or false?

True, as thinking is an operation upon ideas, and I operate the ideas when I think.
Kenji

10/Aug/97

It is possible to revive dinosaurs using some conceivable genetical engineering methodology. True or false?

False. In order to revive dinosaurs, we would need every kind of germs which resided inside their bodies as parasites. Had there been a discovery of the complete set of a dinosaur genome, there would be no way to know what kind of parasites were there in their bodies. There will always be speculations about the environments in which they lived, and since any biological forms highly depend on their environments (including the parasites), complete revival of dinosaurs is impossible with genetical engineering.
Kenji

11/Aug/97

Time is spatial. True or false?

Surely it is spatial in our minds' eyes, as we talk about the direction of time.
Kenji

25/Aug/97

A human is a domestic animal. True or false?

True. People are put in a dense environment to produce something for other people. This is exactly how domestic animals live.
Kenji

26/Aug/97

It is useful for your children to experience killing animals to eat. True or false?

Although I don't have any kids, I believe it would be a good education.
Kenji

27/Aug/97

Larger brain means less number of species. True or false?

True. With larger brains, animal behaviours can vary without much genetic variation so that there is less need to produce different species.
Kenji

28/Aug/97

There is not a point of time at which a conception is made. True or false?

True. A conception is a series of events initiated by a sperm's entering an egg. But at that time, the sperm and the egg are still separate entities. The conception is completed when the genes from these two entities are merged. The merging is a gradual process, and if there is a point of time at which it is completed, it is only a human convenience to think of it that way. This is true for any chemical reaction.
Kenji

29/Aug/97

Ra-nuki kotoba (e.g. tabereru instead of taberareru) is a bad Japanese. True or false?

False. "Taberareru" now has three functions: "able to eat," "be eaten" and a polite form of "eat" (actually "meshiagaru" is better). "Tabereru" on the other hand has just one function: "able to eat." As far as understandability is concerned, ra-nuki kotoba has less ambiguity and is easier to be understood. Some may call it a more advanced form of Japanese language. You just might be witnessing the evolution of a language.
Kenji

30/Aug/97

Your nudity must be concealed from the public eyes. True or false?

True. Nudity reveals that the closest natural existence to a human is one's body. To the public, the nature is something which has to be concealed or to run away from.
Kenji

31/Aug/97

A comedy is more militant than a military. True or false?

True. A comedy declares a war against the whole humanity while a military does it against a group of people.
Kenji